


Personal Notes (7) Me and Ell and this other guy...

by longhairshortfuse



Series: Carlos's Secret Diary [7]
Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: F/M, M/M, Smut, head canon Carlos backstory, v minor condos spoiler
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-23
Updated: 2014-05-23
Packaged: 2018-01-26 06:53:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1678841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/longhairshortfuse/pseuds/longhairshortfuse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A reaction to Cecil's endorsement of Hiram McD and more Carlos/Ell backstory. He really likes her and she likes him... but they want different things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Personal Notes (7) Me and Ell and this other guy...

I hate dragons.

A couple of residents contacted us today to complain about noisy sunsets, a kind of solar shrieking effect that was only heard in old town. The city council said the noise was windmill farms in the next town, which is unlikely since we have not found any. The residents claimed the noise was causing supernumerary eye growth and there have been three documented cases of extra eye development, however those affected are happy with the resulting improved distance vision and depth perception. The source of the noise is yet to be identified. I have assigned the postgrad with the worst eyesight to stay in Old Town tonight and try to get a recording and some bearings.

A suspected criminal has been apprehended by the sheriff's secret police. This would not normally interest a scientist but he is reported to be an 18ft tall, 5 headed dragon. Neither I nor anyone on the science team have seen him in person, but we are eager to do so. True dragons are so very rare. On his show, Cecil spoke very favourably about him, which childishly made me hate the dragon especially as Cecil didn't mention me at all. But tolerance is at the heart of this town, its laws may be arbitrary and insane but they are at least applied to all. 

Cecil played a test of an emergency dream broadcast system tonight. It was weird, the dream houses he talked about were black featureless cylinders. Last night I had a similar dream but the houses were sleek cuboids that grew out of the ground and contained whatever the owner thought they most wanted. I dreamed that I got stuck inside one that was full of lab equipment that needed me to look after it and I couldn't leave because I had no reason. It was disturbing. I woke up terrified, trembling and suddenly needing human connection. I texted Ell but she did not reply and the days when we could bang on each other's doors at all hours are far in the past. I composed a text to Cecil and deleted it, unsent. I thought about Cecil, his voice, his eyes, the way his hips move when he walks, aaaah! the things I want to do with him, to him, until I fell asleep again.

There is some good news from the city council: they are about to legalise time travel. I have some experience in the field of closed time-like loops, although I will have to be very careful to avoid any more accidents. There could be a chance to right a serious wrong, if I can bring myself to open the box under my bed and study what remains of my smuggled out notes from a year and a half ago. I dare to hope, to wonder if I could put things right. 

 

A backstory about

We have had a quiet few days recently which allowed me to catch up on some paperwork and extra-curricular reading. My old notes are patchy, with pages excised and some of the technical details obliterated by the lab censors. I was lucky to be able to get my notebooks out at all. I tried various solvents to remove the thick black marker ink and reveal my original data and specifications but anything that successfully dissolved the ink also dissolved the paper beneath. I could try spectrograph analysis in the lab later when I have it to myself, and look for a pattern of different composition ink underneath the censor's sharpie.

Ell's mass-hallucination monitor and alarm went off last night. We were both unaffected but three of the postgrads reported seeing a huge purple cloud over the town, reaching out tentacles and tendrils into buildings and taking people. I made some notes and cross referenced them with the power outages from a three months ago. The reference to tentacles was quite specific and the description matched what I wrote that I saw back then, although my memory of it is very hazy. Could the cloud have been real, and the hallucination that nothing happened? Ell said definitely not, but I asked the three postgrads to check quietly, without raising any suspicion and without Ell knowing, if there were any new misper reports. They must be busy, they have not returned yet and are not answering texts.

I thought more about how I came to be here, now, working with Ell. When I left home and went to college, it wasn't my parents who drove me there and hugged me goodbye, it was my old science teacher. He wrote to me to make sure I was ok, helped out by giving me his old textbooks with a little cash hidden amongst the more difficult pages, and only dispensing advice if I really needed it. Of course I ignored most of that and hated it when he turned out to be right. He gave me news about my family from time to time and said he was keeping them up to date with my achievements. I wrote to my parents and my sister a few times, but my letters all came back unopened. 

I got a job in a local bar with pretensions to restaurant status to help pay my way and that's where I met Ell. She was waitressing out front getting tips and slapped on her ass while I was in the back, flipping burgers, making fries and getting greasy. We both hated our shifts so one day we swapped. The food improved and so did the behaviour of the customers so the manager was ok with it. I got my ass felt a couple of times a week, but usually a cool stare and a calm challenge of, "Really? Do you want to take that further?" stopped any repeated assault. That approach only backfired on me once, a regular replied, "as far as you like, handsome," and we had a short but deliciously tempestuous relationship conducted mainly in the alley behind the bar after closing time, or in his car down a side street.

It started with flirting that gradually became more and more daring, each of us trying to see if the other would back off first. One night he waited outside until the end of my shift and offered me a lift home. I teased him a bit, scratching his leg from knee to thigh while he tried to drive in a straight line. He turned off into a parking space and put his hand on my crotch, rubbing until he felt me harden. We masturbated each other then he drove me home. Or nearly home, I didn't give my real address. A week later, he was there again and I told him to wait around the back. We rubbed against each other, grinding out our orgasms fully clothed. So we continued once or twice a week, giving and taking casual pleasure, never kissing.

I can remember his name, but choose not to repeat it. He wasn't a bad guy and I liked him although I wasn't in love, I knew I was the side order rather than his main course. He tipped generously, always, and was friendly even after it fizzled out. He brought his wife and child to the bar once, long after our thing was over. I think he wanted me to see why it ended. I made a point of being nice, took them extra fries and free refills, just to show there was no bad feeling on my part. He looked happy. 

I walked Ell home at the end of our shifts most nights as we lived near each other. We talked. A lot. She was, is, so easy to talk to, she makes me feel normal, at ease with who I am, in a way that nobody else ever has. I told her once that I wished she was male but she told me not to be so soft, our friendship wouldn't work if we wanted each other like that. She's right I think, I need that we can talk about anything and everything and nothing will be misinterpreted. I got really drunk one night and came on to her. She told me that if I wanted to experiment with being straight or bi I could fuck right off and threw me out as soon as I could manage to walk in a straight line. I loved her straightforward way of talking, I never needed to second-guess what she was thinking. Another night, much later, after work we were both bitching about our landlords and our disgusting room-mates and the cost of renting and decided we should room together. I couldn't believe how much easier it was to find a decent place as part of a "couple". 

Ell was a year ahead of me, studying biology and psychology. I chose physics and geophysics. I loved college, all those extra classes I could sneak into where nobody would know I shouldn't be there. All those fascinating extra lectures about functional groups and bioluminescence and game theory... I tried to pack in as much as I could whilst keeping on top of my course assignments. I went to one of Ell's psych classes once but it went right over my head. I was confused from start to finish. Science doesn't make me feel stupid, people do that.

We vetted each other's boyfriends, and occasionally Ell's girlfriends. I held her and told her it would be okay when she had a partner who couldn't understand her asexuality, didn't get that she falls in love holistically, not with a gender, not with genitals. I wished... no. Not really, it would never work. I like having sex and I'd miss it. We had a code for when a date was going well or badly that depended on whether we answered the phone with "alright?" or "wassup?" and we knew when to pretend to be out and when to produce an elaborate escape plan. We were best friends. Ell graduated ahead of me but we finished our doctoral programmes together. 

There we parted. I got a postdoc position with a research team studying anomalous energy effects in closed time-like loops. Ell went to work for a big corporation in their HR department. Despite promises, we didn't see each other again for years, until Ell's organisation took over funding of my research project. The rest is painful history.

Later maybe I'll add more, but not now. I have work to do. My old lab notes are calling and I can't procrastinate any longer.

  

_Fuck me! I remember that night. On the way home we stopped off and bought too much wine, you came up to my room and we talked and laughed at bad late-night TV and drank it all. You were comatose five minutes after you kissed me and said we should have sex. It's a good thing there were no smartphones back then and no social media sites, you would have been on all of them half dressed and hanging onto my little sofa-bed like it was spinning too fast for you. You had a horrible hangover next day when I threw you out and you stank. I guess If you didn't need to have sex you might have been an okay boyfriend. Did you know that the company I worked for got bought out a couple of years ago? Not many of the original employees survived the ruthless cull of existing staff. But they kept me, said they saw something in me that they wanted. I wish I had known at the time what they meant. I can't find your old lab notes but I haven't finished searching._


End file.
